It’s easily a driving force in the hobby, a mainstay of collecting and it’s got nothing to do with the current card companies’ creations, the headlines or even much to do on the field today.

It’s vintage.

Walk the aisles at the National Sports Collectors Convention and you’ll see plenty of it in cards, memorabilia and much more. Walk into a good hobby shop, and you will find plenty of it, too, but that’s becoming less of the norm all the time.

Some of the biggest cards from 1980 and before (what Beckett terms “vintage”) can’t quite compete with the shiny autograph-enhanced cards or game-used booklets of today, but they’re never going to go out of style for the highest-grade specimens of the biggest and most-significant cards.

For our next Beckett Sports Card Monthly, we’ll take a look at vintage stars, vintage values and a few selected vintage cards. As part of that package we want your take on vintage in this, the latest Beckett 20 Questions.

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1. Do you consider yourself a vintage collector or own a decent amount of vintage cards?

Chris Olds is the editor of Beckett Baseball and Beckett Sports Card Monthly magazines. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an email to him at colds@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

7 Comments

Its a good thing that the vintage cards are undervalued…lest the dealers price them right out the mainstream market so that most of us putting sets together can still find them affordable and with that easily obtainable….plus dealers need to move product vs. warehousing just isn’t sound business practice. As the old sales slogan goes: Priced to move!

Vintage basketball cards, especially those form the ’70s are a steal right now. You can pick up mid grade rookies of some of the all time greats for around $100-$150. You can find Moses Malone mid grades for less than $50. I think we will see a boost in value of those cards as collectors start to look for more interesting places to spend their money.

I have been picking up mid grade cards of ’60s baseball HOF rookies. A mid grade Bench rookie can easily be found for under $200. A rookie of one of the all time greats for less than the cost of some modern wax boxes is a no-brainer in my book.